Watch out for Sam Holly. If you thrilled to the Dickensian, Stevensonesque adventures of the young, one-handed orphan Ren in Hannah Tinti's beloved and just the right amount creepy, award-winning first novel The Good Thief [[Kindle]] you may fall even harder for the protagonist of her untitled work-in-progress. At the closing night of the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference she read a dazzling chapter in which an older friend and seventeen-year-old Sam rob gold and silver from a clock-filled summer house with fifty rooms, and Sam gets shot in the back by a caretaker. Guns also figured prominently in Rigoberto González's funny and moving essay about a long ago family outing in which he was ridiculed for being afraid of everything and a hopeless shot. Rigoberto, the only out gay man on the conference faculty and a participant in Band of Thebes' queer lit poll, said with this memoir-in-progress he could finally see the humor in his difficult relationship with his father, whereas in his earlier prize-winners like Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa he had been more angry.
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